Is it worth it to upgrade to Windows 7 from Vista with new hardware?

seavixen32 said:

I agree with clearfire62 that you should get a higher WEI score than 5.9.

On my computer the top score is 7.5, but the WEI is dragged down to 5.9 by a HDD rated at 5400 RPM.

As yours is 7200 RPM, it should beat the score of 5.9 easily.

With a mechanical hdd, max subscore achievable is 5.9. To push beyond that, you'll need an SSD or a RAID setup (maybe). In win7, MS changed WEI a bit so raw transfer speed is less important than handling large amounts of read/write requests with low latency.

Arkhi and Bill, thanks for the update on hard drive performance in terms of measuring a computer's WEI as it's something I wasn't aware of.

If existing hard drives are the bottleneck throttling system performance I can see why people are switching to solid-state drives.

clearfire62 said:

64 Bit is means it is twice as fast as a 32 Bit computer(which most are).

Is this a joke?

arkhi said:

Hey seavixen32. No problem :) Existing Hard Drives aren't really much of a bottle neck as long as you got the right ones. Thing is, MS deemed that only SSDs are worthy enough of a score higher than 5.9. SSDs are just too expensive IMHO. I prefer a Hybrid Drive (which is what I have) since it has the best of both worlds.

You can take a look of your HDD score at

C:\Windows\Performance\WinSAT\DataStore\YYYY-DD-YY HH.MM.SS.MS Disk.Assessment (Recent).WinSAT.xml

Note the values under WinSAT>Metrics>Disk Metrics. Be surprised.

I had a look and you're quite right. My highest responsive score came out at 7.8 so perhaps my hard drive is pretty good after all.

I take it that this log is only written each time the WEI is run?

Anyway, I've made a note of the file path you gave me - thanks again.

I found this article that does some benchmarks.
It looks like they are pretty much the same but with Vista perfroming at the CPU minisculely better, and the Win7 performing at the VGA minisculely better.

It doesn't look like there's a reason for the 5.9 vs 7.9 difference. I did some research and those are the upper limits of the Windows Experience Index rating. It's prolly just some Microsoft marketing thing where they add in 2 points or whatever for "subjective user experience" with the new product. I bet Windows 8 cap will be like 9.9 or something...then 11.9...or they will come out with a completely difference useless rating.

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/28...son/index.html